Random
If you mistype "strong" as "string" without thinking and
create a few screenshot mockups months back, does that mean
you are qualified as a Journeyer? Somehow I doubt it, but
that's what I'm certed at... Go figure.

UI Hit Squad
Sigh. Well, I haven't posted any updates because for all
practical purposes the Hit
Squad is dead. This is partially my fault for jumping in
when I had no clue about project management, so pity the
poor fool. I haven't decided what exactly to do about this
ex-limbo status given Eazel's expressed desire to work on UI
as well. I know they have the talent and drive to basically
take over from the GNOME UI Improvement Project after
Nautilus is out the door, so I think I'll concentrate on
learning programming so I can help implement what they come
up with.

Projects
Well, I'm currently hacking together a patch for X-Chat
1.5.x's GNOME version that contains major UI reworkings. So
far I've gotten through the server list, reworked the menus,
and am starting to change the main window's UI. Thank
goodness C and GNOME/GTK+ isn't that difficult (except
strings, which I have grown to seriously hate in the last
few weeks -- although I'm sure that's at least somewhat
related to the fact I had no idea what I was doing going
into it (On a semi-related note, I really wonder what the
heck people who programmed strings in DOS back in the bad
old days were on -- using an OS where a segfault == a reboot
is a pain when you are learning strings, believe me [I don't
know if Windows is as clueless on this, but somehow I have a
hard time believing it isn't]). Hopefully I will have enough
of a clue when I am
finished to start making real contributions for a
change.

Scandalous
I go back to college later this week, so my IRC usage may
drop in favor of forced torture (C++ course *and* a COBOL
course in the same semester <<shudder>>). On the
plus side though, I will get cheap 1mbps DSL, so I can
regain some of my stature as a LPB in various online games.
That's about all from the personal front.

Projects
I've started modifying my GTK+ XMMS Skin to match my
"XenoFace" (Interface) GTK+ theme (which is the hack of
Xenophilia-0.4 that showed up in Carbamide's
Nautilus screenshots from May or so).

Personal
Well, seeing as this is what the diary junkies *really* want
to see, I suppose I have to throw in some detail or event
that isn't computer-related just to let the hardcore IRCers
among us know that the world isn't actually a computer
generated simulation of the real world, composed of channel
bots and the like.

Got back from the oral surgeon a good report (the holes in
my jaw where I used to have two teeth are not infected and I
can go back to eating junk food regularly). Not much else to
report.

I've decided to take the Salon article as an
admonition for
me to start keeping this diary up to date, rather than
posting one diary entry every five months...
:-)

Projects

The "Gnome System Administrator" application
will not be
coded by me. Helix is
working on a scaled down version of it, and I
trust them more than I trust myself re: coding.

Musing

I agree 100% with what I've heard of Miguel's
comments on coding (although I think a transcript of his
keynote will have to be put up somewhere
There
is waaay to much code duplication.
Slashdot's ignorance not withstanding, it's just plain dumb
for every app to load into memory it's own dialogs, stock
buttons, printing support, etc.
From a coding point of view, you're
making you're own job tougher by doing this. From an
efficiency point of view, you're making the system's job
harder by making it load a different version of "Common
Feature X" for each app.
What's more, the aguments for not
depending on lots of libraries is foolish. Unless you're
doing something dumb, like linking to an unreleased library
under heavy development, the APIs are not likely to change
that much between revisions, and if they do, the earlier
revision will still work (you can have more than one version
of a library around, remember).
"Saving the user some download time"
is also lacking in veracity. If you put links up to the deps
that need to be downloaded on the same page as your app
download link is on, and toss some instructions on the page
as well, where's the huge loss. These people are on the
Internet all the time, and they still can surf while they're
downloading (Modems are both not 14.4 and not
single-tasking).
Then there is the argument that
libraries take too much disk space... Can anyone guess what
the majority of my disk space is taken up
by? MP3s. 30% of
my system is MP3 files. One five minute song in 160kbps MP3
format takes up more space than all the .so files in
gnome-libs and gdk-pixbuf. I would bet a
serious amount of cash that a great majority of the people
so concerned about their disk space can spare a few measily
megs for what most GNOME apps need on top of GTK+... (And if
you aren't using GTK+, you're using something nearly the
same size.)

However, the most serious reason for using libraries (at
least from my point of
view and taking into account the assumption that your app is
GUI-based :-)) is that they allow for a consistent user
interface
far more easily and with much more
structure than the implement-it-yourself method does. And
seriously now, what is the point of releasing a GUI app to
the world if you don't care about the interface looking good
and fitting in with the rest of the system.

Ok, this is the first entry for me, so I'll attempt to bring
everyone up to speed on whatever I can.

First off, I would like to appologize for not posting a UI
Summary yet. The reason I haven't done this is because we
haven't finished anything yet, and the entire thing would be
a bunch of links to Eazel, Inc. resources and articles. I
would like to get at least two news items before posting a
new summary, so that's that.

Somewhat related to the first item, I did send out Proposal
#2 (Improving The GNOME-Core Interface) to the other members
of the Hit Squad. All that's left is for them to vote on it,
me to HTML-ize it, mix it with the redesign screenshots I've
already done, and announce it to the world (at which time, I
will post the URL).

And as a little teaser to get you all flipping out (:-)),
I'm planning on learning GNOME/GTK+ programming so I can
code a GNOME System Administrator application. The basic
idea is that I steal the Control Center 2.0 code (the next
gen codebase), change a few labels, and write some sample
capplets. And what do these capplets do? Simple. Configure
system services! That's right, a gnomecc-style interface for
setting up Runlevels, httpd, nfs, exim, samba, etc. And
since it uses capplets, service authors can (read: should)
write their own capplets which handle the intricasies of
their service. A Roxen capplet could ship with Roxen, an
Apache capplet with Apache, etc. This way nobody has to keep
track of every config file format under creation, just the
few that the sample capplets I'll provide handle (I plan on
doing capplets for the current OSS Linux versions of all the
major services: NFS, Apache, Samba, Exim, and a Runlevel
editor). So after this is finished, pester your favorite
vendor to write a capplet for their setup.

If you are already working on such an app, please contact me
immediately so I don't waste my time, thanks ;-)

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